kmods poll

[Josh Boyer]

On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 23:08 -0400, Jon Masters wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-06-19 at 15:01 -0500, Josh Boyer wrote:
> 
> > I'd like to just do a brief poll here just to see how many are yay or
> > nay for kmods.  And I'm not talking about their current implementation
> > or the other various ways that the idea can be accomplished, but rather
> > on the idea of having kernel modules as separate packages in general.
> 
> What's the alternative? There is no practical, real alternative.

Depends.  Using a 3rd party repository is an alternative, and is fairly
practical.  That is already done for some of the binary-only modules.
But anyway, my original question was pertaining to Fedora proper so I'll
stick with that for now.

In Fedora, we currently only have 2 kmods.  That's it.  Other's have
been requested but have either been denied for one reason or another, or
have been superseded by newer kernels (ala some of the wireless drivers
that got pulled in with the wirless-dev tree).

It is not beyond reason that those two kmods could be added as patches
to the kernel package itself and simply built with it.  This, of course,
does not scale to large numbers of external drivers but I don't really
see us actually _getting_ large numbers of external drivers that are
actually approved.  It might have some pain in rawhide, but the current
kmod maintainers are pretty responsive from what I've seen.

I'm mostly just rambling.  In the past, there has been some vocal
dissent for having kmods period, so I wanted to know the opinions from
people on a more targeted list than fedora-devel.

josh